When a News of the World reporter was asked what he felt after finding out his newspaper was being shut down following the phone hacking scandal, he was blunt.

"We think they're closing down a whole newspaper just to protect one woman's job."

News International will go down before Rebekah does.

That woman is Rebekah Brooks, the flame-haired chief of Rupert Murdoch's British newspaper subsidiary, News International (NI).

News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks leaves the office of The News of The World on Thursday. Photo: Getty Images

In the past few weeks, as allegations grew about the extent to which phone hacking was undertaken by News of the World journalists - from murdered children to soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan - pressure mounted on Brooks to step aside from her position.

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But Brooks, 43, who was editor of the paper during the period when much of the hacking was believed to have taken place, refused to budge.

Australian media mogul Murdoch, who handpicked her for the top job in 2009, and his son James expressed their resolute support for her.

Instead, James Murdoch, the chairman of News International, announced today that the 168-year-old News of the World - which has a circulation of 2.6 million and is the country's top-selling Sunday paper - would publish its last edition this weekend.

'Surrogate daughter'

Brooks has often being described as the elder Murdoch's surrogate, or fifth, daughter.

Like Murdoch, she is seen as a ruthless and determined woman who never backs down from a challenge; a tenacious social climber who has pushed her way up through the testosterone-filled world of red-top tabloids.

"Think of the best networker you know, multiply by 10 and that is Rebekah," a colleague of Brooks told the Financial Times.

Born in Cheshire in 1968, Brooks decided at 14 that she wanted to be a journalist and took up a job as a tea girl at a local paper.

In 1988 at 20, she joined News of the World as a secretary before moving to The Sun, another tabloid in Murdoch's stable of newspapers.

A little more than a decade later, in 2000, she was appointed editor of News of the World - the youngest-ever editor of a British national newspaper at the time.

She broke more records when she became The Sun's first female editor in 2003, a job she stayed in for six years before Murdoch handpicked her to fill the position of chief executive at NI.

As a journalist, Brooks was depicted by her former boss and now CNN anchor, Piers Morgan, as an aggressive employee who would stop at nothing to get the job done.

One time, when she found out that The Sunday Times was about to publish a serialisation of a biography of Prince Charles, Morgan said she dressed up as a cleaning woman at the rival paper, hid for two hours in a bathroom and nicked a copy of the Times as it rolled off the press.

The News of the World then published the text word-for-word the following day.

As editor of the paper, she pushed for a British version of Sarah's Law, like Megan's Law in the United States, which would inform parents if a child sex offender was living in their neighbourhood.

The campaign proved controversial, and despite the paper wrongly publishing the names and photographs of people who were not connected to paedophilia, Brooks was unapologetic.

'Arch-networker'

Brooks was also fearless in her pursuit of friends in the world of the rich and powerful.

Labelled an "arch-networker" by a former News of the World editor, Phil Hall, Brooks counts as her friends the Prime Minister, David Cameron, with whom she reportedly goes horse riding, former prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and their wives Cherie and Sarah.

"She was very influential for the organisation in terms of gaining the political contacts that Rupert wanted to have," Hall told The New York Times.

"If Rupert wanted a weekend at Chequers with the prime minister, then Rebekah would organise that.”

Another media executive told the Financial Times: "She has charmed the back legs off every member of the Murdoch family and their other halves.

"Nobody quite understands that the link is like an umbilical cord."

High life

With both her first and second husbands, actor Ross Kemp and horse trainer Charlie Brooks, she kept up her high life.

In a 2009 Vanity Fair article quoted in The Independentabout Brooks and her second husband Charlie, whom she married in 2009, the couple were depicted as living a life befitting Hollywood celebrities and billionaire businessmen.

"When Charlie Brooks wakes up in the mornings in his barn in Oxfordshire, he likes nothing better than to fly to Venice from Oxford airport with his soon-to-be wife Rebekah Wade, the dazzling redhead editor of The Sun, for lunch at Harry's Bar. Later in the day, after shopping and sightseeing, the couple fly back to London for dinner at Wiltons in Jermyn Street."

At this year's Wimbledon, The Independent pointed out, she watched matches from the royal box, and attended the famed Glastonbury Festival in her personal helicopter while sipping champagne from a glass.

A life outside News International?

But what would happen if, one day, Brooks ceased to be the apple of Murdoch's eye? Would she survive outside the walls of NI?

Brooks was once reported to have remarked to a departing colleague: "Why on earth did you leave News International?" The Observer reported.

The Independent said Brooks had built her career within NI and "there is no visible life after Murdoch".

"She might it very hard to readjust if she were torn away from the organisation which has nurtured her through much of her adult life. She and Murdoch talk every day. She is not required to answer to anybody whose name is not Murdoch. When the old man enters a crowded room, Brooks is immediately at his side as his introducer and protector."

As a friend told The Observer in 2009 when it was first announced that she was taking over the helm: "News International will go down before Rebekah does."